


and the blood stains your clothes (red red red)

by TsukiDragneel



Series: Alternate World War Two [5]
Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Poland needs a hug, War, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-28 09:39:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17785004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TsukiDragneel/pseuds/TsukiDragneel
Summary: the product of my weeb love for hetalia and my research paperthis should not exist but it does anyway





	and the blood stains your clothes (red red red)

Blood.

So much hot red blood, the color of liberation, of his lost freedom.

Poland fingers a blood-stained armband, buried along with the burned corpses of his people. Those who fought for freedom, now buried in the rubble of the very city they fought to liberate.

It was a long shot from the beginning. His underground government took a risk, and it failed. Now, the Polish flag that once flew from the top of the post office is ripped and torn, lying on the ground at his feet.

He passes bodies on the long, slow crawl out of Warsaw. Bodies of young children, of the elderly, shot in the head or left to burn alive. Wounded people crying out for help, children shielded from death by their parents’ bodies.

So much senseless death.

They believed they could win. They attacked on August 1st, attacked in a last desperate gasp for liberation from the Germans. Fought for those who died, for those who were sent to such remote parts as Siberia simply for living. Fought for those children without parents, for those suffering under German rule.

And now? All they managed to do was add more bodies to the count.

He’s not sure how many died. Close to 200,000 would be his guess. Most of them were non-combatants, their only crime living in the city. 

His fist slams into the wall, hot tears streaming down his cheeks.

It isn’t fair, goddamnit. It’s not fair that he, his nation, his people that have fought so  _ damn  _ long just to be free have to keep fighting every day for something that should be theirs. It isn’t fair that his two so-called ‘allies’ would barely help him fight at the outbreak. They should have done something. Anything.

He lets out a gut-wrenching scream, falling to his knees. All around him, buildings he cherished, buildings he watched rise, lay in rubble. The heart and soul of Warsaw lies in pieces around him and he isn’t sure how to fix it.

He hates them.

He hates England and France, for doing nothing when the Germans invaded Danzig. He hates Lithuania and Czechoslovakia for refusing his government and his people. Hell, he even hates America, across the ocean, doing  _ nothing  _ to help as his people bleed out in the streets.

But by  _ far _ , the nations most worthy of his ire are Germany and Russia.

He  _ hates  _ them with a ferocity previously unmatched. He hates Russia for massacring his soldiers in the forest of Katyn. He hates Russia for what he did in the half of his territory he conquered, hates how he shamelessly deported hundreds of thousands of his people to Kazakhstan and Siberia without a single care for whether they lived or died. 

But Germany.

The nation that forced a large portion of his population to live like dogs in ghettos, the nation that took hundreds of people a  _ day  _ from Warsaw, simply for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The nation that threw his people into horrible prison camps such as Auschwitz, the nation behind the thousands of dead bodies now lying in the streets of his capital. 

“I hate you!” Poland screams, slamming a fist onto the remains of a cobblestone path. “I hate you! How could you do this to us! We are people, dammit!”

Hot tears roll down his face, the bitterness of defeat and crushed hope filling his heart. They’re dead, all dead, because of the senseless brutality of a tyrannical regime. 

What did they do to deserve this?

Most of his people are farmers. Most of them merely try to eke out a living on meagre plots of land, trying to provide for their families. What did they ever do to Germany to warrant this much hatred?

The Germans will claim that it’s Danzig, but that’s just a poor excuse. They want land, and they don’t care who they have to murder to take it.

He  _ knows  _ that they’re all going to die. He knows it as surely as he knows that there are children’s bodies in that pile of corpses, even babies no older than one. Children shot in an act of bitter hatred, for no other reason than for living.

How is living such a crime nowadays?

In any case, it hardly matters anymore. It hardly matters that Poland might as well be dying here, might as well lose himself amidst the bodies of his dead people. England and France made that  _ abundantly  _ clear when they barely helped him.

It was but a formality anyways.

He nurses the last flame of rebellion in his chest as he staggers out of Warsaw, blood dripping into his eyes from an old wound. He moves to brush a lock of golden hair out of his eyes, and grimaces when it flops back into his face, bloody and nearly dripping.

It’s not his blood.

It’s never his blood. 

It  _ almost  _ is. In a way, the blood dripping down his face from that old cut is theirs, and his. But their blood… the blood of people he  _ should  _ have been able to protect…

It  _ hurts _ .

Hurts more than the blood trickling down his face, hurts more than the protests of his twisted ankle from long ago. Hurts more than the old scars from bullets tearing through his skin, because at least then there was a  _ chance  _ of freedom.

Now, he’s tasted the sweetness of freedom and lost it again.

And isn’t  _ that  _ just bullshit. He’s fought so hard, his people have fought so  _ damn  _ hard, and for what? To be trampled over, leaving their rotting bodies in the streets?

No.

He limps over to the side of a small child, blood staining her brown coat  _ red red red the color of blood and freedom  _ and gently lifts her into his arms. 

Her hair falls away from her face, and he catches sight of a bullet hole in her forehead weeping blood, and he nearly cries. The brutal efficiency of German shooters, of Russian cruelty, so emotionless and merciless that they’re capable of putting a bullet through a child’s head.

He can’t.

Instead, he gently places the girl’s small body into a hole by the side of the road and goes to search for a shovel.

There are so many to bury, so many dead thanks to his weakness.

But that doesn’t matter.

He’ll do it, no matter how long it takes. For the dead rotting in the streets, and for himself.


End file.
